Gender stereotypes and power: Perceptions of the roles in violent marriages

Men are generally observed to exercise more power than women within the marriage relationship. One way of expressing such power is through the roles in violent marriages, in which the man is usually the more powerful, violent person and the woman is the less powerful, abused person. This research tested the hypothesis that roles differing in power can explain why men are believed to be high in agency and women to be high in communion. Agency involves both positive traits (self-assertiveness) and negative traits (motivated to master and subjugate others); communion involves positive traits (accommodation and concern for others) as well as negative traits (excessive selflessness and vulnerability). College students rated stimulus persons on the gender stereotyped traits. In one condition, the husband was described as violent towards his wife, and in another condition, the traditional power relationship was reversed and the wife was described as violent towards her husband. On both the positive and negative traits, violent women and men were perceived as high in agency and low in communion. Abused men and women were seen as high in positive communion and low in positive agency, although the abused woman was lower in positive agency than her male counterpart. For abused women and men, the hypothesized results were found for negative agency, but not all of the expected findings were obtained for negative communion. The sex differences that were found could be explained by differences in the perceived physical aggression inflicted by violent men and women.Portions of this paper were presented at the 1991 annual meetings of the Eastern Psychological Association, New York, and the Association for Women in Psychology, Hartford, CT. I would like to express my appreciation to Carl F. Wiedemann for his statistical advice.